The End of Thought?

2 Oct

Written By Mo Issa

This morning, I sit in stillness, coffee in hand, birds singing faintly in the background, with a pen and my journal. For a moment, aliveness flows through me. Writing, even these first lines, feels like oxygen.

And yet, I can’t escape the sense that I’ve been slipping. Too many mornings scrolling Instagram. Too often, I outsource my own words to AI. The pages of this journal stay thinner than they should. Am I becoming lazy—or simply losing the discipline of thought?

The real danger isn’t that machines will outthink us. It’s that we will stop thinking ourselves.

Two essays I recently read had a profound impact on me.

James Marriott, in The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, argues we are drifting into an age where scrolling, reels, and fragments replace the sustained act of reading. When literacy erodes, so too does imagination, critical debate, and even the foundations of democracy. A literate society isn’t just one that can read—it’s one that can reflect, pause, and think. Without that, we collapse into consumption and credulity.

Derek Thompson, in The End of Thinking, sharpened the warning. The danger isn’t that AI will outthink us, but that we will stop thinking for ourselves. Writing, he reminds us, is not just expression but thinking made visible. To outsource it is to surrender the discipline of forming thought. He uses the metaphor of “time under tension”—just as a muscle strengthens under sustained strain, so does the mind under the strain of working through complexity. Remove that strain, and thought atrophies.

Both pieces left me uneasy because I saw myself inside them. I’ve been reading less, writing less, thinking less. My mind marinates too often in the noise of WhatsApp threads, Padel groups, Instagram clips, and headlines of terrorism, fascism, and Middle East chaos. It leaves me more angry than alive.

But reading “Great works” (literature and philosophy) again—after years of detours into “self-help”—has brought me back. It feels like recovering a muscle I almost forgot I had.

I’d forgotten what my MFA tutor once told me: “Stay narrow and go deep.”

And so, a new discipline every morning: with my phone out of reach, I read twenty pages of a philosophical or literary work, one interesting Substack article (not one that describes how to increase readership), and conclude with three longhand pages in my journal.

Let the purity of thought come before the flood of noise—a ritual not of productivity, but of presence.

To me, that is how I can never lose my thinking.

Still, I circle a deeper unease. Why is it so hard to stick to the mundanity and simplicity of this practice that allows me to think?

Why do I keep waiting for the “big project”—the podcast, the book, the one thing that will justify it all—when the truth is in the daily act?

Camus would say that revolt is not about launching the perfect project, but about pushing the stone each day with dignity, even if it is futile. Perseverance is the philosophy of the absurd in practice.

And yet, there’s another tension—what if my thinking is getting shallower? My time with friends, or superficial conversations at dinner, sometimes leaves me feeling thinner and less alive. I wonder: am I selling myself short, indulging in gossip and distraction? Even my journal can feel lightweight, circling themes of purpose but failing to dig.

Simone Weil once described attention as “the purest form of generosity.” Perhaps true depth begins not with grand projects, but with learning to attend fully—to a page, a sentence, a silence, a good, deep conversation.

So I remind myself: I can only become more interesting by immersing myself in more interesting things. Not headlines and reels, but the complex, luminous works of those who came before. Not another self-help cycle, but the strange, demanding voices of Hesse, Nietzsche, and Weil.

If the mind is a muscle, then it strengthens under the strain of its complexity.

So I return, again, to the page. To the discipline. To the small acts that may seem trivial but make me think.

The podcast, the book—let them wait. First, I must live into the music of my soul, and that music is played in daily notes, not grand symphonies.

And what matters most is this: to preserve my thinking against the erosion of noise.